FEATURE:
The Legendary Band’s Most Underrated Album?
The Beatles’ Please Please Me at Sixty
_________
DEBUT albums…
are always a little tricky and divisive. Few artists produce their best work at the start, and it usually provides the building blocks for better and more evolved music. Many would argue that about The Beatles’ stunning debut, Please Please Me. It was released on 22nd March, 1963. I wanted to mark its upcoming sixtieth anniversary, as it is a historic album. Whilst it is not the band’s very best album, I do think that it is their most underrated. Many review Please Please Me in terms of its context and the way it introduced The Beatles. Few actually discuss the quality of the album. Yes, there are some rough edges and quite a few covers on the album. Maybe one or two of the cover versions are not as good as they could have been but, when you consider some of the brilliant originals on the album (I Saw Her Standing There and P.S. I Love You among them) alongside some brilliant cover versions (Boys is especially thrilling and standout), it is an album that stands the test of time! Fresh, live-sounding and full of variation, The Beatles mix Pop, Rock and the sound of R&B girl groups in one of the most exciting albums I have ever heard. It would begin a very busy and important career. By 10th July, 1964, the band released their third studio album, A Hard Day’s Night. In just over a year they had not only recorded that much material, but their original and incredible songwriting was coming to the fore.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s genius was coming through. Even by 1964, they stood out as the greatest songwriting duo of their time. There is plenty of promise throughout Please Please Me. I love how much there is to love. Each Beatles gets a turn in the spotlight in terms of vocals. The driving and compelling I Saw Her Standing There opens the album in a perfect way (with Paul McCartney on lead vocals). Of course, Please Please Me ends with John Lennon – with a sore throat and cold – sounding shredded, raw, and tired providing one of the all-time great vocals for Twist and Shout. Quite a straightforward album, The Beatles would definitely expand and change their sound. One cannot deny the historic nature of Please Please Me and how it did launch The Beatles to the wider world. To me, their debut album is one of their strongest. They are at that stage where you can hear howe excited they are to be together! Even though albums from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) onward are great, splits were starting to form. Please Please Me is the Liverpool quarter at their closest. Even though the fourteen songs on the album are very much a product of their time, Please Please Me is so relevant and identifiable in 2023. At fourteen tracks, you might expect it to be bloated and over-long. With a few exceptions, most of the songs are under two-and-a-half minutes. I will wrap up soon, but I wanted to bring in a couple of different perspectives on The Beatles’ debut. This is what NME wrote in 2016:
“In truth, the real magic on ‘Please Please Me’ lies in the cover versions, The Beatles at this point were born interpreters. Here is where you can literally feel their charisma and their character, honed over those million nights in a million shitty clubs, emanating from the speakers: the way George’s lead vocal gets swamped by his over-keen bandmates’ harmonies on ‘Chains’; the Fabs’ lapdog humour in giving Ringo a song called (and about) ‘Boys’; Paul’s doe-eyed balladeering on ‘A Taste Of Honey’ and John’s ever-so-slightly over-egged, throat-shredding attempts to stamp his ‘I’m a rebel, me!’ credentials over soppy ballads ‘Anna (Go To Him)’ and Burt Bacharach’s ‘Baby It’s You’. Where the magic is most potent here is on ‘Twist And Shout’: where all of these things beautifully combine to present the world with the two-and-a-half minutes that evoke the image of Beatlemania, and thus the earliest peak of pop culture better than any other. Perfection that is all over the shop. Anarchy you could take home to mum. Rock’n’roll that is about fuck-all and absolutely everything at the same time.
They’d make better records, and better recorded records, and more perfectly realised statements, and get Ringo to get rid of the not-very-moptop-at-all quiff he sports on the cover. The Beatles were learning as they went, but the resulting, snapshot nature of their first foray into albums is exactly what makes it so great. It is, and was, buoyed by the excitement of ‘Please Please Me’ the single, for certain. Had they spent another 12 months in the studio re-jigging things and making it ‘just right’, the world may well have moved on to something else. Yet it just came out as it was, imperfect but beautiful enough, then a month later there was another new single, then a couple of months after that another new single, and then a couple of months after that another, better album, and so on. Repeat ad finitum. They wouldn’t let people forget them. Thank God”.
I do genuinely feel Please Please Me is The Beatles’ most underrated album. In terms of how people feel it is promising but not essential. There is such joy, depth, and variegation that you keep coming back to the album time and time again and discover new things. Produced by the legendary George Martin, the album topped Record Retailer's LP chart for thirty weeks, an unprecedented achievement for a Pop album. Intended to replicate the sound of The Beatles live, all but four tracks from the album were recorded on 11th February, 1963. Eight of the fourteen tracks were written by Lennon and McCartney, which I think is an amazing achievement. The band could have put more covers in, but we get to hear some of the most original Lennon and McCartney originals at the start of their career. Even if Please Please Me has been voted among the best albums ever by some publications, you rank The Beatles’ albums and most would place it down there with Yellow Submarine (1969), Let It Be (1970), or Beatles for Sale (1964). I would actually out Please Please Me third or fourth in the list. Maybe not as strong as Revolver (1966), Rubber Soul (1965) or Abbey Road (1969), it can challenge Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). That is a big claim, but one I think that is not an exaggeration. This is what BBC had to say about Please Please Me when they reviewed it in 2010:
“Producer George Martin was, in Paul McCartney’s words, unsure of the band’s musical abilities when he invited them to Abbey Road to record songs they’d spent months perfecting live. In that environment they regularly shined, but studio experiences were still comparatively alien. What Martin recognised was a focus, a desire for more than their present lot. He listened beyond the music of the moment, hearing a future that these four young men would shape for themselves. The self-contained pop group was born, and quicker than either band or producer envisioned.
The recording of Please Please Me was fast, the band committing ten of these tracks to tape in just a single day – “a straightforward performance of their stage repertoire,” was how Martin summarised the sessions. Previously released single tracks and b sides completed the set. Featuring more originals than not, Please Please Me saw the McCartney-Lennon songwriting partnership blossom – from the title track to Love Me Do, There’s a Place to I Saw Her Standing There, the collaboration was incredibly productive, and would continue to bear fruit until the group’s Let It Be swan song of 1970.
The immediacy that these songs carry remains irresistible, and Please Please Me’s lengthy reign at the top of the UK albums chart proved the perfect response to Decca’s rebuttal that guitar groups were “on the way out” when the label turned down the opportunity to sign the band. Lennon’s vocal on the climactic Twist and Shout is perhaps the most wonderfully loose, ragged-edged element of the entire record, and the essentially ‘as live’ recording showcases a group with their feet still very much in the clubs and theatres, performance just preceding actual arrangement. Their way with composition is relatively simple; effective, but black and white nonetheless, playing exclusively to recognised strengths.
What followed made The Beatles the inspirational band they’re regarded as today. But the grandest oak begins as the tiniest acorn, and Please Please Me is just that: perfectly formed for what it is, and ready to split when promise is realised”.
On 22nd March, 1963, the world received this unbelievable and bombshell debut album that changed Pop. It reached number one in the U.K. In 2013, Please Please Me’s fiftieth anniversary was celebrated by current artists mirroring The Beatles by re-recording the album in a single day. It and the other recordings were broadcast on BBC Radio 2. I think that Please Please Me is one of the best albums ever. It is The Beatles’ most underrated album – in spite of the fact it has received lots of positive reviews and has been placed high in rankings lists. On its sixtieth anniversary on 22nd March, I hope there is some celebration and a big event. I wonder how Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney will mark the occasion. The joyous and iconic Please Please Me is considered to be one of the most important albums ever. That is going to be the case…
FOR the rest of time.